Clean

Chapter 2PERSPECTIVE: THE FOUNDATION OF SUSTAINABILITY

He profits most who serves best

—MJ Osborn

The Osborn family had been in America for well over two centuries when Merritt J was born in 1879. Thomas Osborn left Ashford, in southeastern England, sometime in late 1637 for Britain's North American colonies. Osborn's arrival in New Haven aboard the Hector in 1638 would put him arriving with a large group of Puritan refugees escaping both religious persecution and conscription into the civil unrest that would spark the English Civil War within a few short years. Four generations later, MJ's father William would find himself in La Porte, Indiana, in a region we refer to today as Michiana.¹

In 1856, William married Charlotte Armstrong, and the couple would parent eight children, seven of whom would live to adulthood. Sometime before 1870, the Osborn family moved to Buchanan, Michigan, where William bought and ran a business. Merritt was the eighth and final child, and he joined the family on Valentine's Day of 1879. Some 80 years later, he would reflect on the early influence of his family: “As to being a ‘go-getter,’ I came from a very large family, all hard workers, including my father, who was a furniture manufacturer.”²

Sometime in 1886, William Osborn returned from a sales trip just in time to watch his plant burn to the ground. MJ remembered staring out the front window, watching the conflagration, and listening to the clang of the fire bells in a failed attempt to extinguish ...